IAN PATTISONWEB DEVELOPER

Email is dead. Long live Email?

By: Ian Pattison, 10 May 2016

With social media, search engine marketing, content marketing, display advertising, and et al, where does the venerable old grand dame of digital marketing sit? She sits right top centre of the piece because, believe it or not, email marketing is still the queen of digital marketing.

Why? Because of the massive, massive response rate you get from it. All social media things have their main benefits - Facebook is good for amplifying your message by using others to amplify and advocate for you. Content marketing is good because it fishes the internet for prospective clients. Email's strength is that, once subscribers have granted permission for you to send it to them, is becomes part of a 'checklist' or a 'to-do' list. For all its strengths, social media is missable. If clients don't log on for a couple of days, or aren't fully engaging with your posts, they run the risk of being missed. Email is never missed.

Here are the statistics:

Email SUBSCRIBERS

Facebook SUBSCRIBERS

Twitter FOLLOWERS

Audience Size

10,000

10,000

10,000

Reach

96%

30%

2%

Effective Audience

9,600

3,000

200

Why is it that email is so effective? Rather than the free-flowing river of news feeds, your email appears to your subscribers as part of a 'to-do' list in their email inbox. They are almost guaranteed to see at least the 'from' and 'subject' lines of your email, compared with social where the chances of it being seen at all are relatively slim. While it may appear as a given to prioritise email in your digital marketing, there are other considerations that may shift priorities - depending on the campaign or style you find more effective.

Get in touch and I can provide a suite of tailor-made email campaigns for your business. The idea is this - Imagine you are wanting to sell more of a particular product. I start by creating an campaign email in MailChimp that includes a call-to-action that links to the campaign landing page. This email is to be sent to customers that have shown a propensity to buy these products in the past. I then create a campaign-specific landing page on your site that displays the campaign content, products, or information.

It's a pretty simple, but effective, way of using email to target subscribed customers.

Why use MailChimp? With MailChimp we are able to record and rank pretty much everything that goes on with the campaign. We get to see how many people opened your email - compare that with your industry average, we can tell you how many times people clicked on links from your email and who they were, and to which part of your website they went. Using this information, we can work towards strengthening your customer database and which campaigns work better on which segments.

Keen on having a more in-depth discussion on how you can use email marketing to boost your website's performance?